So much for our “five major sports.” We look on at four of them, and if we can support the family, and pay taxes and insurance, on $1250 a year less than we earn, we take part in the fifth.
The minor sports, as the editor will tell you, are tennis, boating, polo, track athletics, trap-shooting, archery, hockey, soccer, and so on. Not to mention games like poker, bridge, bowling, billiards, and pool (now officially known as “pocket billiards” because the Ladies’ Guild thought “pool” must have something to do with betting), which we may dismiss as being of doubtful physical benefit, since they are all played indoors and in a fog of Camel smoke.
Of the outdoor “minors,” tennis is unquestionably the most popular. And it is one whale of a game—if you can stand it. But what percentage of grown-ups play it? I have no statistics at hand, and must guess. The number of adult persons with whom I am acquainted, intimately or casually, is possibly two thousand. I can think of ten who play as many as five sets of tennis a year.
How many of the two thousand play polo or have ever played polo? One. How many are trap-shooters? Two. How many have boats? Six or seven. How many run footraces or jump? None. How many are archers? None. How many play hockey, soccer, la crosse? None.
If I felt like indulging in a game of cricket, which God forbid, whom should I call up and invite to join me?
Now, how many of my two thousand acquaintances are occasional or habitual spectators at baseball games, football games, boxing matches, or horse races? All but three or four. The people I know (I do not include ball-players, boxers, and wrestlers, who make their living from sport) are average people; they are the people you know. And the overwhelming majority of them don’t play.
Why not? If regular participation in a more or less interesting outdoor game is going to lengthen our lives, why don’t we participate? Is it because we haven’t time? It takes just as much time to look on, and we do that. Is it because we can’t afford it? We can play tennis for as little as it costs to go to the bail-game and infinitely less than it costs to go to the races.
We don’t play because (1) we lack imagination, and because (2) we are a nation of hero-worshippers.
When we were kids, the nurse and the minister taught us that, if we weren’t good, our next stop would be hell. But, to us, there was no chance of the train’s starting for seventy years. And we couldn’t visualize an infernal excursion that far off. It was too vague to be scary. We kept right on swiping the old man’s cigars and giggling in the choir. If they had said that misdemeanours such as those would spell death and eternal fire, not when we were old, but to-morrow, most of us would have respected father’s property rights and sat through the service with a sour pan. If the family doctor were to tell us now that unless we got outdoors and exercised every afternoon this week, we should die next Tuesday before lunch, you can bet we should get outdoors and exercise every afternoon this week. But when he tells us that, without healthful outdoor sport, we shall die in 1945 instead of 1949, why, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a chimera, a myth, like the next war.
But hero-worship is the national disease that does most to keep the grandstands full and the playgrounds empty. To hell with those four extra years of life, if they are going to cut in on our afternoon at the Polo Grounds, where, in blissful asininity, we may feast our eyes on the swarthy Champion of Swat, shouting now and then in an excess of anile idolatry, “Come on, you Babe. Come on, you Baby Doll!” And if an hour of tennis is going to make us late at the Garden, perhaps keep us out of our ringside seats, so close to Dempsey’s corner that (O bounteous God!) a drop of the divine perspiration may splash our undeserving snout—Hang up, liver! You’re on a busy wire!